Friday Night Lights

If you’ve had enough of the depressing news for the week, feast those things in your ocular cavities on these 10 pop culture stories that we’ve culled from the Internet and beyond! (But mostly the Internet.) They aren’t here to make you feel OK again, but maybe they’ll take your mind off the fact that the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

1. Clear eyes, full hearts, secret speech?: Entertainment Weekly has the mother of all Easter Eggs in the form of a special finale pep talk from Coach Taylor on “Friday Night Lights” that was supposed to play over the end sequence. Well, here it is, in all its gruff-but-lovable glory. (Though it is kind of awkward, the way he talks about never forgetting the feeling of “that hot breeze slapping my face.”)

2. All about the Bitcoins: If you haven’t heard about the Internet’s new form of currency that takes hundreds of dollars in computer equipment to “mine” and is vulnerable to hackers stealing all your fortune in fake (but kind of real?) money, count yourself lucky. Or just read this story.

3. Arnold Schwarzenegger is a fashion icon and a really great guy:

I wonder if he had this shirt custom-made, or if he found it in a Salvation Army or something. Maybe Marie is the name of a new ride at Six Flags?

4. Paula Abdul wants to be the new Khaleesi: It’s common knowledge that Paula is a little cuckoo for cocoa puffs, so why anyone would take on a job as her assistant is beyond me. Maybe it’s so they can come back and report how the “X-Factor” judge needs to have her entourage constantly remind her that she’s a “warrior, survivor and gift.” Dragons!

5. Dissecting the Coens: David Haglund over at Slate watched every single Coen brothers movie. (Who hasn’t?) At first he thought they were self-indulgent. Then he thought they didn’t make any sense. Finally he came to the conclusion that we aren’t supposed to like these characters-bordering-on-caricatures, and it was all a broad, meandering metaphor for real life. Kind of like this article is for a Coen brothers film. Wait … brilliant!

6. Fergie, Duchess of York, can’t make it through a whole interview: I guess we’ll have to wait until Australia’s “60 Minutes” on Sunday to find out what made Fergie “go off the rails.” (Though we kind of already know it’s the infamous 2010 tape where she begs for money to see Prince Andrew.)

We can only hope the reporter didn’t try something akin to that Dalai Lama joke. You know how those Australian newscasters are. Where is Barbara Walters when you need her?

7. Mark Zuckerberg dares to call “Chill” Facebook app “lame”: Guys, not to freak you out, but the fallout from this could be devastating. Especially because the Zuck wasn’t talking about FarmVille.

8. Bizarro Twitterverse even scarier than the real thing: Check out “fake Twitter” site Heello. It’s by the same guy who founded Twitpic, but it’s a hell of a lot weirder. Though honestly Twitter is such a mess sometimes that reading a CNN tweet all in caps about Justin Bieber doesn’t seem that out of the ordinary.

9. Temporary teeth tattoos for everyone! (But mostly the Japanese):

At least they are a step up from those real teeth tattoos? Or maybe they are like a gateway drug for permanent images that look like red rot on your chompers. Moms, don’t let your kids start putting decals on their baby teeth, or else they will grow up to be this guy.

10. That “Russian Dolls” show actually happened and you missed it: You probably skipped the premiere to watch “Jersey Shore,” right? Shame on you! There is a whole world out there of trashy cultures you have yet to experience! Well, here’s the first episode in its entirety. Try to keep up, it moves fast. Brighton Beach forever!

2. Weird TV show concept of the day: In an opposite move from “FNL,” NBC will be picking up “The Firm,” a series based on the Tom Cruise movie taken from the John Grisham book. The cast is stellar — Juliette Lewis, Josh Lucas, Molly Parker from “Deadwood” — but how much mileage can they get from a plot where the audience already knows the twist ending?

3. Anniversary of the day: On the tail of MTV turning 30, Mad magazine’s “Spy vs. Spy” series celebrates its 50th birthday today. Wait, they’re still making “Spy vs. Spy” stories? And they are turning it into a movie? Hopefully it will be based on the video game based on the cartoon based on the comic strip.

4. Raise of the day: After rounds of negotiation, Jennifer Lopez will be bleeding a fortune out of someone other than Marc Anthony. Her new paycheck for another season of “American Idol” will be “a smidge over” $20 million for the season … which is $8 million more than she made last year as a judge.

5. Art porn of the day: Lars Von Trier may be shooting his latest film “Nymphomaniac” in two forms: hardcore and softcore. But if “Antichrist” was his version of a softcore film, I don’t even want to know what he’d put in an X-rated feature.

3. “Friday” of the day: Grantland has compiled an oral history of “Friday Night Lights’” successes — and failures — throughout the years.

4. Fashionista of the day: Kanye West, who certainly knows a thing or two when it comes to coordinating your bling, may be designing a womenswear line for Fashion Week this fall.

5. Conceptual art of the day: This is what happens when you dump a lot of paint in the middle of a busy street, as demonstrated by Berlin bikers last year.

Yay for art, but who the hell is going to clean this mess up?

Here are some “Friday Night Light” tips for when you lose at life.

1. Get rid of that pride, boy

In the “devil town” of Dillon, everyone must eventually answer for their sins. Whether its conning your church out of money to buy steroids, making an off-handed racist remark to the press, or screwing your crippled best friend’s girlfriend — and hey, we’re still in season one! – there is no moral or ethical slip that goes unpunished on “Friday Night Lights.”

And while that could turn another type of show into a real downer, Coach T. is always there to pick you up when you fall … as long as your hubris doesn’t stand in the way. When QB Matt Saracen skips practice to get drunk at the local strip club in season two, and misses his grandmother’s trip to the hospital (yikes), it’s hard to imagine anyone getting back on their feet from that kind of screw up. But as Coach knows, there’s nothing like an ice-water bath and some primal crying to start the healing process.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the McCoy family: with son J.D. too proud (or scared) to break away from his over-achieving, physically abusive father and side with the protective coach, he ends up taking on more and more of his old man’s nasty qualities. Both Matt and J.D. make bad decisions because of their daddy issues, but only Matt is strong enough to ask for help. Guess who ends up better off in the end?

2. If you’re going to lose, lose honorably

The Panthers lost the state championships at the end of Season 3, and it cost Coach T. his job at the school. That’s the part of life where most people would give up and crawl under the covers with a bottle of Xanax. But Eric Taylor knows he made the right call by benching J.D. and putting Matt in, even if that meant losing the game and hurting his career.

This theme is repeated off the field as well: Tim Riggins going to jail for his brother when the police raid their chop-shop; Lyla Garrity continuing her cheerleading after her affair with Tim makes her a social pariah; Jason giving up his dreams in order to raise the child he accidentally fathered. After all, losing is half the game, and as Tami Taylor puts it, “Either way, the sun is going to come up the next morning.” Sure, it’s a rehashed line from “Annie,” and the point is even more cliché, but it still holds water … win or lose, in life it’s all about how you play the game.

3. Surround yourself with your people

Even Coach Taylor isn’t infallible, and when he does screw up, he has the support of his team, his family, and even Buddy Garrity to rely on. No one on “Friday Night Lights” can do it alone, and woe to the person who tries to remain tough and aloof when trouble comes knocking. Everyone on the show has to learn this lesson – some people like Tim Riggins have to learn it over and over – but the nice thing about football metaphors is that they work even when you’ve heard them a thousand times before. There is just no “I” in Taylor’s team.

Unfortunately, that does means the show occasionally takes a small-town mentality when it comes to characters trying to leave Dillon to move on with a life past high school football. This is usually shown as a bad decision, like when Coach goes to teach college ball at the end of season one, or when Riggins goes to college. Whatever happens to Jason Street or Smash or Lyla after they head out into the big scary world is their own affair … by leaving the Dillon nest, they are removed from the sacred circle privy to Coach’s pep-talks. We can only imagine that they’re all gutter junkies now, turning tricks and wishing that they’d stayed in Texas.

4. Failure is a state of mind

Living in Dillon isn’t easy. This is doubly so if you live in East Dillon, which is so completely different from (West?) Dillon that it’s basically “The Wire’s” portrayal of Baltimore dropped down in the south. East Dillon is so messed up that no one on the show really even talks about its existence until a Katrina-like natural disaster somehow decimates the poor, black side of town (but not the affluent suburban area). Or when Coach T. is exiled to run the East Dillon Lions as punishment for not throwing himself at the mercy of Mr. McCoy. But looking around the decimated playing field of East Dillon High, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor make their first move together: picking up the garbage strewn on the grass, one piece at a time.

By the end of the fifth season, the Lions are the new Panthers, thanks to tough love from a coach who won’t let his team be defined by their poor track record, bad attitudes, or shady after-school activities. If you want to act like a coward, you best get the hell off the field and out of the coach’s house.

5. …except when it isn’t

On “Friday Night Lights,” almost every episode includes a character learning something about themselves and becoming better for it: a better friend, a better son or daughter, a better teammate. But for all the emotional manipulation that the show cleverly steeps itself in, it grounds itself with the memory of its very first episode, when star quarterback Jason Street is paralyzed from an injury during a game. Sometimes life is suffering, princess, and there is no way you can “better yourself” out of the pain.

Coach T.’s voice leading the team in prayer at the end of the pilot episode sums this up better than I ever could:

“Give all of us gathered here tonight the strength to remember that life is so very fragile. We are all vulnerable. And we will all, at some point in our lives, fall. We will all fall. We must carry this in our hearts: that what we have is special, and that it can be taken from us. And when it is taken from us, we will be tested. We will be tested to our very souls.

We will now all be tested. It is at these times, it is this pain, that allows us to look inside ourselves.”

In other words: just because you can’t fix it, doesn’t mean you can’t grow from it. Clear eyes, full hearts … yes, even if you lose.